The Jaguar

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Numbly she stared past him. Benjamin sat on his haunches a few feet in front of Saturnino, who had collapsed. Benjamin’s forearms rested on his knees and the flashlight dangled from one hand, the beam ending at the ground. He looked like a man trying to reason things out. She lifted the torch beam to Armenta’s face and saw the agony on it.

  20

  LATE IN THE BLACK MORNING Ivana’s wind finally pushed the Chevrolet off the highway. The car planed to his right and Hood steered into the drift and touched the brakes and watched the wall of rainwater crest up to his left, then fall. The heavy old Impala righted its course and slid back into its lane. When he sensed that the car wasn’t about to slide off again he leaned forward and wiped the fogged-up windshield with a wad of paper napkins, the defroster nonoperational.

  “You drive almost as good as a Veracruzano,” said Luna.

  “It’s a bad enough highway without a hurricane,” said Hood.

  “It’s a famously bad highway, even for Mexico. We will stop and stay in Tuxpan.”

  “A famously bad city for floods,” said Hood.

  “I hope it is not to be having another.”

  They had been driving all night, putting all the miles they could between themselves and the Reynosa police, trying to make as much progress toward Merida as they could before Ivana ground them to a halt. One man napped while the other drove but there was no real sleep for Hood, who saw the slaughter of Julio again and again, wondering if he should have said something to Julio as he stood outside the motel room door, something to confirm that he was alone and okay; or if he should have looked through the window to make sure that everything was fine before opening the door. But he had not and the young man was dead along with five baby narcos who seemed poorly prepared for the violence they had commenced.

  They checked into the Floridita Hotel and got a second-floor room. Hood gave the clerk a photo album of Mike Finnegan pictures with a hundred dollar bill in it, got the usual answer, and made his usual offer. Upstairs in their room Hood handcuffed the suitcase to a bathroom water pipe. He knew the quaint little luggage locks and a mere water pipe were no obstacles to determined men, but might discourage the undecided or the merely curious. They tossed a coin to guard the money or go get food. Hood won and opted to run the errand and took his gun.

  An hour past sunrise the sky was a close dark ceiling and the rain continued and the wind buffeted the town. The water was up over the curbs and Hood’s shoes were soon soaked but from what he could see it was a pretty little city, built along the Tuxpan River, with Mexican Navy frigates and Pemex tankers berthed against the lush greenery, and nicely kept homes and businesses along the water.

  He stopped at a newsstand and bought papers, then found a cafe for coffee and pastries. On the walls were framed photographs of the famous inundaciones of 1930 and 1999, and Hood was struck not just by the water standing head-high against the buildings, but by how little those buildings had changed in the sixty-nine years between the photos. He looked through the window at the Tuxpan River and compared it to the river in the 1999 photograph and thought it had a long way to go to get that high. Outside, the rain was steady. A group of children floated plastic boats down the flooded street past a Volkswagen dealership.

  A man and woman blasted in from outside in a rush of wind and rain. They wore official clothing—khaki safari shirts with emblems over the pockets and matching drenched baseball caps with emblems also. The man was a large Mexican and the woman a stout gringa who pulled off her cap and shook it outside quickly, then pulled the door shut. She nodded at Hood as the big man went to the counter unleashing a torrent of words to match the rain.

  Hood read the logo on the woman’s shirt: RC. He picked out a few of the man’s urgent words. Six hundred crocodiles! The rain flooded the ponds and the water rose! All escaped!

  “Crocodiles?” Hood asked.

  “River crocodiles,” said the woman. Her face was flushed with excitement and she was breathing hard. “They’re endangered. We’re with the Reserva Cocodrilo in Alamo, up the river. We’ve raised hundreds of river crocs. The rain in Alamo is much heavier than here but we had no idea the water could rise so fast and we did what we could. We caught some of the hatchlings and juveniles and put them in our pickup truck. But the rest just swam away. You can’t rescue a fifteen-foot crocodile who doesn’t want to be rescued.”

  The big man turned with a cup of coffee and handed it to the woman. He looked at Hood and said buenos dias, then turned back to the counter woman and continued his tale.

  “Where will they go?” asked Hood.

  “Where the river takes them. Which will be pretty much right here. Tuxpan. It’ll take them a while to get this far, I’d guess.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “They’re wild animals and they can go twelve feet long in the wild. We have some larger. Quite a few, actually. The big ones weigh over a thousand pounds. Very heavy and wide. They can take off an arm or a leg pretty easy. Then you bleed to death.”

  “Do they eat people?”

  “Not regularly. We feed them chickens and fish.”

  “Six hundred.”

  “We’re trying to find a way to tell the people here not to kill or capture them. They’re not a danger unless you provoke them. Or if you don’t know what you’re doing. I thought of making up some signs, but in this rain and wind…”

  “What about the radio stations?”

  “The Tuxpan radio tower is down. The power lines along Highway One-Eighty blew over an hour ago. Long distance is shot. We’ll do what we can to let people know. The sad part is the crocs themselves. They’ll just wash up downriver and people will kill them.”

  “I hope you can save a few at least.”

  “We got twenty or so in the truck outside. Little ones.”

  “Good luck to you, then.”

  Hood put the newspapers in the two plastic bags, then shouldered his way back outside. He went to the children with the boats and told them about the crocodiles that might be washing into Tuxpan. They looked at him as if he’d just ruined their day. He led them over and held them up one at a time and they looked into the bed of the reserve pickup at the crocodiles. Some were trying to scamper up the walls of the truck bed, others just lay in the rain motionless and prehistoric, their big tan eyes and vertical pupils wide against the world.

  “Tener cuidado,” he told them, pointing to the river down which the crocs would come.

  He began his way back toward the Floridita picturing six hundred fifteen-footers weaving their ways through the streets of Tuxpan. He had seen National Geographic TV crocodiles, and their girth and speed had always impressed him. He looked up and down the flooded streets for the telltale knobby snouts of the crocs but saw nothing.

  The bags of food in his hands made him think of Julio Santo. What a pleasant and intelligent young man he had seemed, and proud of his city and of his calling. Proud of Juarez, thought Hood. When human nature seems nothing but bleak you get a guy who’s proud of his violence-wracked city and you think well, maybe human nature has a chance.

  He strode through the rain past the fountain at city hall still oddly gurgling away during the rainstorm and past the aqua taxi stand, where a family laden with bags of oranges and bananas from across the swelling river was stepping off the boat. Hood paused and shifted both bags to one hand and slid his .45 from its hip holster to the pocket of his water-resistant jacket, by now thoroughly soaked by the storm. He leaned into the wind and kept his eyes moving and every hundred feet or so he looked behind him for gunmen or crocodiles and kept going.

  They ate their breakfast and slept and that afternoon the rain continued steadily and the wind was harder. Hood could see from their second-floor window that the street was under a foot of water and there were no children playing and only two trucks still moving, and that people below were boarding up not only the first-story doors and windows but those on the second levels as well.

  At three o’clock the
power in the Floridita failed or was shut off to prevent catastrophe. Hood slipped a penlight from his pocket and found the candles back on the closet shelf. Luna tried to use his satellite phone but there was no service. Through Ivana’s great bluster Hood could hear the sounds of alarm downstairs, voices calling out and the loud thumps of furniture being moved or dropped.

  Downstairs in the storm-dark lobby he found the staff and some of the guests using buckets to bail rainwater into wheeled plastic laundry hampers. Young children and old people sat or stood on the check-in desk to be out of the water and some of the children were running up and down the shiny wood counter but others were crying and the old people stubbornly ignored the world around them. One of them held an umbrella over her head. Hood saw that the floor was a foot underwater already and it was pouring in under the door and around the windows and surging up from the basement faster than they could work.

  The rain accelerated, louder and faster. Outside the water charged down the sidewalk past the floor-to-ceiling windows, two feet high against the glass and Hood wondered if they would hold up against the debris that was sure to come. A small dog swam with the current looking for dry land but there was none. Palm fronds and coconuts and wads of foliage rushed along toward the Gulf of Mexico. No crocodiles. Hood found a bucket back in the flooded kitchen and joined in.

  A minute later he helped four other people trying to push one of the hampers outside to be emptied. They managed to muscle it to the doorway and others held open the lobby doors so they could force it outside and Luna and two other people joined in and they pushed and pulled it into the sidewalk current, but when they tried to tip it over the floodwaters plucked it away from them and down the street it zoomed, wheels up and sinking until it stopped against a car left parked against the curb.

  The manager sloshed in from his office with the news that the highway had been washed out both north and south of town, which meant that Tuxpan was now isolated and on its own. “And the airport too is closed, of course,” he said. He looked at Hood. “Maybe Señor Bravo, we may let some of the older people and children come to your room for safety?”

  Hood thought of the money that was Erin McKenna’s life but he did what he had to do. “Yeah. Sure.”

  Hood and Luna led them up the stairs and unlocked the door and let them in—six elderly, four children and their mothers. The children climbed onto the beds and started jumping up and down while the oldsters tried to shoo them off so they could sit. Luna talked calmly to the children in Spanish while he found a pad of hotel stationery, several postcards and two pens from the desk drawer, a handful of plastic wrist restraints from his travel bag and a dispenser of dental floss from his shave kit, all of which he delivered to the two older kids with orders to share and to play quietly. They looked at the items, then back to Luna hopefully. Then they nodded and quieted down and Hood could see that they were respectful of the thick-necked, muscular bull of a man that was Valente Luna. One of the girls was already wrapping the floss around one of the pens in a decorative flourish.

  In the bathroom Hood made sure the suitcase was still locked and he told himself if he just stayed vigilant and alert the money would be fine and the hurricane would pass and he would be in Merida in two days, on time and ready to deal. He could feel the wind shivering the roof and took some comfort that the Floridita had been pictured on the walls of the breakfast cafe, having withstood the flood of 1999, and would surely survive this.

  He went back into the crowded room and looked out one of the windows. A drowned cow floated down the middle of the street toward the river. Then a wooden chair painted yellow and a small Airstream travel trailer and a white minivan. There were clots of foliage racing past and a large king palm bobbing upright on the ballast of its rootball and a larger palm tree snapped off mid-trunk. A man rode a truck tire down the rapids, centered on the wheel and holding on to the treads for his life, the tire spinning wildly and flipping over and back and over and back again in utter torture of him. A blue sedan. A Brahma bull. A refrigerator with magnets and stickers somehow still attached to the door.

  Hood felt the wind hurling itself against the building again and he thanked God it was built of concrete blocks. He hoped they had used good rebar and lots of it. He knew that so long as the roof held, the danger wasn’t the wind but the water undercutting the foundation enough for the heavy concrete to collapse.

  He waited for one of the families to come out of the bathroom, then checked on the suitcase and it was all right so he came back and looked out again to where the wind blew the palm trees flat and blew the rain flat too. It looked like they were not being blown at all but rather sucked in by some great beast with its mouth tight to the horizon.

  By evening both the children and oldsters were either asleep or wanting food so some of the mothers raided the downstairs kitchen and returned with loaves of bread and a pot of cold tortilla soup from the refrigerator, a bowl of cooked rice, a large tray of flan, bagsful of beers and sodas, flatware and plates.

  Hood sat dutifully on the toilet beside the suitcase, dinner plate on his knees, listening to the rain lash the walls and thinking of Beth Petty back in Buenavista.

  After an unusually violent flurry of rain and wind, he rose and went into the room and stared through a window to the street. The floodwater was almost to the tops of the ground-level doorways now, its ownership of Tuxpan nearly complete.

  An hour before sunset the room shook violently, then pitched toward the flooded street. It felt to Hood as if one corner of the foundation had been pulled away. He lost his balance and fell to one knee. Several of the others fell fully and hard, and the children yelped out, terrified. There was a great grinding roar from below, then the windows burst. Hood knew they were going over and braced himself. A long moment passed. Then, as if saved by invisible brakes, the Floridita came to a shuddering stop and now hung precariously in midair over the street. Hood and everyone else in the crowded room instinctively flattened themselves to the floor but gravity pulled them forward toward the gaping glass-toothed window openings and the raging brown torrent below. He crawled back into the bathroom and found the suitcase slid nearly to the downside wall, outstretched on its handcuff chain. Luna crawled in too and saw the luggage and they gave each other wordless looks and Hood felt the building start to fall again.

  He climbed onto the suitcase and reached his arms around it and held on tight. Again he heard the great shear of the foundation parting and again the room hurtled downward. But the Floridita fell faster this time, and it was still accelerating as it whooshed into the floodwaters below, then burst apart like a tower of dominos.

  Hood landed hard in the water and held fast to the money. He felt the water pipe break free. He took a deep breath as the current took him down. He had ridden bodyboards in the Pacific and now he tried to use the same balance to control the suitcase but he was rolling over and over in the current and knew his breath would not last long. He grabbed a handle and dropped through the torrent to the street and felt his feet touch bottom then lift off, and when they hit bottom again he sprang skyward and at the apex of his feeble jump managed to suck in one blessed lungful of air.

  Nearer the surface the nylon suitcase established buoyancy. Hood held on with one hand and with the other he pulled himself toward an orange tree gliding past and when he grabbed a branch it lifted and pulled him and the suitcase along, floating not sinking. He breathed hard and looked futilely for Luna. Instead he saw one of the children from the Floridita down current, bashing valiantly to stay afloat and crying, and Hood, kicking for all he was worth, was able to steer his barge so the boy could take the nearest handle. The suitcase with its plastic-wrapped million in cash and the orange tree were lifesavers as Hood and the boy careened down the middle of the flooded street, past the last buildings to where the town ended, then swiftly accelerating straight and deep into the raging Tuxpan River.

  They raced. Far ahead through the gray evening and the pelting rain loomed the Navy
frigates and the Pemex tankers and the barges and beyond them rose the towers of the oil platforms. From across the suitcase the boy looked at Hood in wordless terror. Hood could see a black dog paddling amidst the logs and brush and suddenly they were among hundreds of rose bushes in blooms of many colors, all in identical black plastic pots, dipping and bobbing wildly, the flowers bowed but stubbornly undestroyed.

  Hood felt their slow clockwise pivot as they raced mid-river. He tried to kick the crude barge toward the nearest shore but he sensed no influence over their speed or bearing.

  —Are we going to die?

  —We will live.

  —How?

  —We’re not ready to die.

  —Who will save us?

  —Whatever you believe in will save you.

  —When?

  —We’ll reach the harbor soon. The water will be slower and we will swim to shore.

  —I don’t like the dark.

  —It’s not dark yet, but some of the lights in the harbor are on. See.

  —As long as I see lights I can live.

  —Good, then. Watch the lights.

  —There are sharks in the harbor and sometimes crocodiles but I can live.

  —Done deal. I’m Charlie.

  —I’m Juan.

  21

  THE RAIN SLOWED AND THE wind slackened and the evening light turned to pewter. Hood felt suddenly cold and very sleepy. He laid his head over on one shoulder and looked out at the Navy ships and the lights of the oil platforms just beyond the harbor. He could still feel the speed of his makeshift barge but it seemed less now and its rotation was slower too as the Tuxpan River widened into harbor. Hood roused himself and tried to kick them to the port shore, where he could see the smattering of lights and the Navy ships and oil rigs grown taller, looming in the gray sky. The boy was quick to join him, holding the suitcase handle with just one hand and trailing his legs out and kicking steadily.